Association of common health symptoms with bullying in primary school children

Katrina Williams · Stuart Logan

438 citations0/0 files storedBMJ

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Bullying, Victimization, and Aggression Child Abuse and Trauma Workplace Violence and Bullying

Abstract

Abstract Objectives : To estimate the prevalence of bullying in primary school children and to examine its association with common symptoms in childhood. Design : Semistructured health interview conducted by school nurses as part of a school medical. Setting : Newham, east London. Subjects : All children in year 4 of school during the academic year 1992-93. Main outcome measures : Reported bullying and common health symptoms. Results : 2962 children (93.1% of those on the school roll) were interviewed (ages 7.6 to 10.0 years). Information about bullying was not recorded for 114 children. 22.4% (95% confidence interval 20.9 to 24.0) of children for whom information was available reported that they had been bullied. There was an association between children reporting being bullied sometimes or more often and reporting not sleeping well (odds ratio 3.6, 2.5 to 5.2), bed wetting (1.7, 1.3 to 2.4), feeling sad (3.6, 1.9 to 6.8), and experiencing more than occasional headaches (2.4, 1.8 to 3.4) and tummy aches (2.4, 1.8 to 3.3). A significant trend for increasing risk of symptoms with increased frequency of bullying was shown for all reported health symptoms (P<0.001). Conclusions : Health professionals seeing primary schoolchildren who present with headaches, tummy ache, feeling sad or very sad, bed wetting, and sleeping difficulties should consider bullying as a possible contributory factor. Key messages Many children report having frequent headaches or tummy aches, that they sleep poorly, wet the bed, or feel sad Children who report these symptoms also report being bullied substantially more often than do their peers Although it is not clear whether the association is causal, health professionals seeing such children should ask about bullying

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 438 citations exist upstream.

References

1994Bullying at school: what we know and what we can do 1994Bullying at School 1993A survey of the nature and extent of bullying in junior/middle and secondary schools 1992BULLY/VICTIM PROBLEMS AMONG MIDDLE SCHOOL CHILDREN

Cited by

2013Bullied Children and Psychosomatic Problems: A Meta-analysis 2008Bullying and suicide. A review 2009School, Neighborhood, and Family Factors Are Associated With Children's Bullying Involvement: A Nationally Representative Longitudinal Study 1999Bullying behaviour and psychosocial health among school students in New South Wales, Australia: cross sectional survey 2000What Good Schools can Do About Bullying 2004Bullying behavior and associations with psychosomatic complaints and depression in victims 2005Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, but Names Will Make Me Feel Sick: The Psychosocial, Somatic, and Scholastic Consequences of Peer Harassment 2005School Bullying and Suicidal Risk in Korean Middle School Students

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.